Chicken Salad Chick has arrived in east Cobb. The new fast, casual restaurant opened on March 18 at Providence Square in Marietta.

Established in Auburn, Ala., in 2008, Chicken Salad Chick offers a unique chicken salad experience allowing customers to chose from 15 original chicken salad flavors, as well as four gourmet soups, four flavorful sides and freshly-baked desserts.

“It’s one of those places that’s fun to go eat. It’s the experience,” said Kay Lynne Mitchell, who owns the franchise with husband Frank along with Tom and Cheryl Melton and Don and Carol Schrader.

“Chicken Salad Chick is such a unique concept of chicken salad. When you start tasting the salads, it depends on your mood that day because you can get salty, you can get nutty, you can get spicy, or you can get fruity. Every day I feel different, and I eat a different flavor,” said Mitchell, a former east Cobb resident who lives in Rome.

The wives of the franchise are related to founder Stacy Brown. Each has a chicken salad named for them.

“Each flavor is named after someone in the founder’s life. The three chicks opening the current location are her mother (Melton) and two aunts (Mitchell and Schrader),” Mitchell said.

Brown, an Auburn University graduate who lives in Auburn, started making chicken salad out of her home as a means to stay at home and care for her three children. “She was looking for the perfect chicken salad,” Mitchell said.

Once she perfected the recipe, she developed different flavors. With the help of her future husband and co-founder Kevin Brown, they opened a small take-out shop.

“That’s how it started. She opened the first day and was sold out in an hour-and-a-half so she doubled her pounds the next day and the next day and continued,” Mitchell said.

For five years, Brown grew two stores in Auburn. The first year after franchising the operation, the couple opened 13 stores, according to Mitchell. Chicken Salad Chick will be developing 85 franchises across the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina and South Carolina, and has plans to expand nationally in the next few years.

“We love the concept of (Chicken Salad Chick). We chose east Cobb because we knew they would fall in love with it. We know the concept will be well received there,” Mitchell said.

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